Krista: Improve schools - keep teachers in classroom

If you're the parent of a school-age child, at some point this has happened to you: The school year starts, your child gets a superstar teacher, you're ecstatic ... and the superstar teacher is constantly pulled out of the classroom to work on curriculum development or testing.

Much is constantly made of student absences but, until this week, too little has been said about teacher absences.

A report by the National Council on Teacher Quality, released Tuesday, showed the average teacher in urban districts misses 11 days of school in the average 186-day school year. It said 28 percent of teachers missed 11-17 days and 16 percent missed 18 or more – about one-tenth of a year's instruction.

The fine print most people didn't pay attention to was that nearly a third of those absences were for school business.

Faced with an endless stream of state mandates for curriculum and testing – and additional requirements for everything from bullying prevention to handling blood-borne pathogens – school districts face a tough choice between having to yank teachers out of class to train or letting them actually teach.

While students suffer when their teachers are frequently gone – studies show a significant loss of achievement from 10 teacher absences – districts worry their public report cards will suffer if their staffs aren't prepared for new state requirements.

Local school leaders say that, this past school year, the worry almost turned to frenzy as teachers ramped up for multiple testing changes coming next year. High school teachers prepared for new end-of-course exams. Teachers in grades 3-11 worked on the new Common Core educational standards tests. Kindergarten teachers spent hours getting ready for new kindergarten-readiness assessments.

Meanwhile, elementary staffs are still trying to meet the Third Grade Reading Guarantee, special education teachers absorb never-ending changes to federal requirements and every district is overwhelmed by the new Ohio Teacher Evaluation System, which requires not hours but days of staff training.

When skeptics voice vague concerns over "too much testing," this is the collateral damage they should be worried about.

Districts are stuck. The state mandates changes with little turnaround time. Many federal grants require staff training, but teacher contracts usually include few days for staff development, and most districts can't afford to pay teachers extra to train in the summer.

The new report on teacher absences is setting off needed alarms in some communities about how often the single most crucial factor in achievement – the teacher – is missing from the classroom. In Cleveland and Columbus, for example, more than 60 percent of teachers missed more than 10 days. In Cincinnati, 40 percent did. The cost nationally is $424 million in substitute pay and an immeasurable loss in student learning.

Turning the situation around requires professionalism on the individual level. But it also requires a frank conversation between school districts and state legislators about how much change schools can absorb and how quickly, whether 186-day calendars are long enough both to teach students and train teachers, and how cash-strapped districts can change if they're not. It's not a glitzy issue or necessarily a pleasant conversation, but it's the stuff real educational improvement is made of. ⬛